Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

Bad QoS alienates customers, employees but IT management lacks visibility to the problem

“It happened so fast,” says Justin Flitter, Chief Marketing Officer at Virsae. The pandemic saw millions of workers go home where they set up as best they could with whatever was available. Since then, companies have stepped up to buy devices such as noise cancelling headsets, but there remains a huge gap. Flitter tells us that a survey by Metrigy found that more than half of at-home workers suffer from a spotty internet connection. Poor video performance (46%) and poor voice performance (29%) were also troubling. Beyond the statistics, the culture of work seems to have evolved to accept quality issues. Flitter points out how almost everyone has been on a call where people’s poor Internet, maladroit devices, or flailing apps, see team members flick off their video, hit mute or even place a land line call to join the meeting. To remedy these solutions, employees are spending their own money, pursuing homemade remedies, while the issues they are trying to fix create CX issues that literally cost companies money, not to mention reputation.

Meanwhile, organizations can lack visibility to the problem.  “You can’t fix what you don’t see,” says Flitter. In this podcast Flitter lays out the scope of the problem and makes the case for Virsae’s approach to being able to see across the network to discover IT issues that impact employees and CX. Flitter tells us that Virsae can deliver visibility right to the edge, right to the level of endpoint devices such as headsets, whether agents are wearing them in an office or in home or even public space environment. Work from anywhere requires a way to see what’s happening, everywhere. The goal is to get people a consistent level of service wherever they are doing their work.

Visit www.virsae.com

Syxsense has been working on endpoint security for over 10 years. They are talking about all endpoints – even the ones you do not know about. Once more, they will perform a scan of the endpoint and evaluate it for vulnerabilities which would include the verification on the latest release and patches.

Ashley Leonard

Ashley Leonard, CEO at Syxsense speaks to Don Witt of The Channel Daily News, a TR publication about their current technology and their newly released Syxsense Enterprise which provides MSPs, MSSPs and customers the ability to remediate security configuration vulnerabilities.

Listen in as Ashley provides great insight into the major endpoint issues resulting from the shift to the remote access worker.  Since this configuration is now here to stay, he covers the measures necessary to keep the corporate network secure.

Lastly, Ashley is a channel person.  He has been part of the channel for a long time and has structured the sales opportunities to go through the channel making it a win – win solution for the resellers and for Syxsense.

Syxsense has created innovative and intuitive technology that sees and knows everything. Secure every endpoint, in every location, everywhere inside and outside the network, as well as in the cloud. Artificial intelligence (AI) helps security teams predict and root out threats before they happen—and swiftly make them disappear when they do.

Headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California, Syxsense is a growing and dynamic organization with offices in four countries and 12 partners in nine countries. Over the past 10 years, Syxsense has worked with more than 500 companies ranging from 100 to 100,000 endpoints delivering a variety of solutions for organizations of all sizes as well as managed service providers (MSPs).

For more information, go to: https://www.syxsense.com

“The problem with STIR/SHAKEN is that it’s not a mature technology… just yet” says Richard Quattrocchi of Mutare. “It was originally designed with the hope of stopping robocalls, but it really doesn’t do that. On its own…” Quattrocchi adds. In this podcast we learn that STIR/SHAKEN needs to be used with other layers of protection to achieve the desired impact of decreasing the amount of unwanted automatic calling. Quattrocchi discusses the Mutare approach which serves five layers of protection. We also see a dashboard that pulls together, graphically, the volume and timing of unwanted calls. “The smaller the business, the larger the volume, proportionally, of unwanted calls,” leaving smaller businesses overwhelmed and frustrated. Mutare looks at blocking nefarious calls, which are malevolent, which can include criminal level attempts to commit fraud, along with nuisance calls, which can become disruptive.

Visit www.mutare.com

Wholistic is the word Maurie Munro uses to describe how Peerless Network Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams brings simplification and accountability to create a Tier One, end to end solution. “Now we can offer this to the enterprise customers,” adds Munro. Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams provides deeper integration into the Teams platform to enhance and streamline the Teams Phone experience around networking, provisioning, management, and reporting APIs. Doing this provides customers a simplified Teams Phone experience delivered by operators that has parity with Microsoft offerings.

The more optimal use of Teams means better calling experiences. “Buying direct is very attractive,” says Maurie, adding that Peerless sees Operator Connect as a way for customers to leverage strong choices in the market. Jim Brewer, EVP of Products and Technology at Peerless, adds, “This is just the first,” as he outlines that more announcements are in the works as the company continues to build choice and simplicity into the complex journey enterprises are now navigating.

Visit www.peerlessnetwork.com

R2 rapidly becoming a national standard and without it, buying used gear is severely restricted

Many companies and organizations are making proclamations of the commitment to green, environmentally friendly and community aware policies. The secondary market always offered a great deal of help in this area since the market served as a place to give IT equipment a second or third life, postponing their journey to being disposed of. Now that end of product life requires more scrutiny, more attention, security and environmental issues are front facing. Public entities, publicly traded companies and organizations of all kinds have made claims to the public, to customers and investors. Now markets are insisting on verification.

“It’s all about transparency,” says Michael Hutchcraft who is the President of Glacier Consulting. In this podcast Hutchcraft joins John Spagnuolo, Implementation Consultant with IQ Reseller to discuss R2 and trackability within the ITAD space. We learn what R2 is and why it matters. We learn why Spagnuolo believes that the ends of the excel spreadsheet as the penultimate tracking app in keeping track, is at hand. Major municipalities, hospitals and many more are saying that if you don’t have R2, you won’t be able to buy their used gear. Spagnuolo believes that we are within handful of years before R2 is needed to buy from almost any entity.

Visit www.iqreseller.com and https://glaciercs.com/

Integrates Bitdefender Threat Intelligence Data

“What we really do is focus on the midmarket that has been really abandoned by the industry and give them a solution that’s going to manage all of the aspects of email security under one umbrella, giving them all these data points, and it’s extremely easy to use, manage and deploy,” says Zack Schwartz, Vice President Business Development, Trustifi. “So, you don’t have to be a sophisticated engineer to work on this, as with many of our competitors in the market today.” As an opportunity for the channel, Schwartz says that his product was “Made with the MSP in mind.” In this podcast we learn how Trustifi has created an integration incorporating that vendor's threat intelligence data from 1M+ vectors, which will further enhance the company's outbound email threat protection. We learn about "Smart Indexing" where with cloud archiving that allows for rapid auditing, meaning a faster response to issues. The bigger picture is that as MSPs bring the Trustifi solution to an end user, the MSP gains that “trusted advisor” status they are seeking.

Learn more trustifi.com

Read the press release https://telecomreseller.com/2022/08/09/trustifi-integrates-bitdefender-threat-intelligence-data-strengthening-inbound-security/

“I believe that customer service and customer experience is the glue that holds businesses together in tough times,” says Justin Flitter, Chief Marketing Officer for Virsae.

Facing an uncertain environment, businesses are turning to cost cutting, so why not cut spending on CX? In this podcast Justin Flitter makes the case for making CX a priority, not a cut. Flitter tells us that we need to look at WFH, labor recruitment challenges and CX as a continuity: satisfied workers lead to satisfied customers.

But WFH, which itself is appealing to many people, brings new challenges. If workers are trying to self-diagnose connectivity challenges, or worse, if they are not even aware of them, the result can be bad CX. And bad CX has immediate and fiscally toxic results. An unhappy customer can write unhappy social media reviews that can choke growth and amplify the headwinds in an already challenging landscape.

Visit virsae.com

Green IT is more than one thing. Green IT is really a whole way of looking at the entire lifecycle for single piece of equipment, from manufacturing to recycling. Green IT is about process, people, products, and places. It means taking a wholistic approach to IT asset management, to IT people and to IT services. What will it take to get more for a unit of energy, and what will it take deliver an hour of labor. If some of this sounds abstract, Florian Pitten, International Business Development Manager with K&P Computer, draws in the missing lines to give us a big picture view of how Green IT matters to dealers, resellers, end users, enterprises and to the public at large It’s the right thing to do, but it’s also a path to better growth and better margins. Pitten cautions that simply pushing all to the cloud can create limited visibility to the company’s real impact. With over 30,000 products on hand, ready to ship, K&P combines the services of the traditional secondary market with in-house testing, refurbishment, and reseller services, logistics all with a Green IT strategy in mind.

Visit https://www.kpc.de/en/

Nextiva’s brand-new app makes it possible to manage all a business’s conversations in one place - no more app switching, or clunky integrations required. Voice, video, SMS, chat, video meeting, team collaboration, the ability to share, along with customer information and engagement tools. Nextiva brings it all together. The streamlined experience up-levels the customer experience and boosts team productivity. With this launch, Nextiva is making fundamental business technology accessible to every business.

In this podcast, Nextiva CMO, Chris Reaburn, walks us through the Workhub, and discusses the opportunities for end users to do better internally and in CX. Internally, Workhub’s arrival means less fumbling around to fish stray emails out of a sea of mail, while going to another separate system to find notes for a meeting or information on a customer’s history. We learn that this means more internal productivity and happier customers. By bringing it all together, people have the information they need to understand customer pain points and customer history. When a customer feels that they are understood, other issues can be better resolved. Reaburn also sees an exciting channel opportunity.

Visit www.nextiva.com

The edge and securing the edge is a process, a journey. That’s one of the things Salim Khouri, Director of Global Solutions Engineering of Expereo tells us about SD-WAN and SASE. We now live in a changed world, where millions of workers have been sent to the edge. Offering services and platforms that are consistent across a company with locations in rural Brazil and midtown Manhattan, is desired, but not always easily achieved. In this podcast Khouri discusses the technologies. We learn about Expereo’s approach, and how this approach can help enterprises.  Khouri compares these approaches to a DIY model, and other alternatives. We learn that that we are on a journey that will eventually take us beyond SASE and SD-WAN. Expereo is the leading provider of managed network solutions powering enterprise and government sites in over 190 countries.

Visit https://www.expereo.com/